Tuesday, September 25, 2012

There is an ongoing theme of isolation and justified outrage combined with crass, irreverent humour that appeals to pretty much every part of me. Many bands have songs about personal experiences with mental illness or of being labelled as crazy (The Ramones, Suicidal Tendencies, DRI, L7 to name a few). This music - along with other heavy, hard or weird music of the ‘80s and ‘90s - was my lifeline as I stumbled through adolescence. Today, it is still my go to music when I feel overcome by frustration, anger or stress. There’s nothing quite so cathartic as belting out “You can’t bring me down” by Suicidal Tendencies.

But the problem is that punk music doesn’t love me.

When I was fourteen I remember watching a video of some live punk show in which the male lead singer pulled a woman onto the stage and punched her.

That was when I learned that my beloved punk scene was no safer for me as a woman than anywhere else.

The misogyny and homophobia, both overt and implied, is so rampant in punk music that I quickly grew weary of trying to find new bands. These days at least I can search online for lyrics and get a sense of their overall vibe but in high school the best I could do was borrow tapes from friends and fervently read the liner notes.

Mostly I look for bands that don’t have more than one or two objectionable songs, for example Suicidal Tendencies is not bad but only if I don’t listen to this song. Occasionally I find a band that is persistently offensive but has one or two songs that standout; Dayglo Abortions has very little to recommend them lyrically (this, for instance) – sad because their sound is kickass – but I can’t get enough of rocking out to “Homophobic, sexist cokeheads”. Often the best I can hope for is that they don’t make me want to punch them.

But every once in a while there’s some ray of light like Liza and Louise by NOFX. When I was sixteen and newly out I was hanging out in the skate shop, looking through the 45”s when I saw this.

Without hesitation I bought it and instantly fell in love. Who knew that a bunch of straight dudes could write a song about lesbians that was actually about lesbians and not some porn fantasy for the male gaze (or ear as it were).

My relationship to punk music is complicated to say the least.

And this brings me to something that many people I follow on Twitter have been discussing lately, namely that Chris Brown’s violence against Rihanna is being held up as evidence of the misogyny in rap culture. This black rap artist is being held up as the poster boy for male violence while Charlie Sheen (to name only one example) manages to skate right past his history of abuse. Even when you compare those two narratives there are telling differences in how people explain the two men’s behaviour. Charlie Sheen’s offensive behaviour was due to his addictions and mental health while Chris Brown’s is due to his involvement in hip -hop culture – a convenient shorthand for blackness.

I have heard many black feminists talk about their love of hip-hop and the ways in which it is complicated by the misogyny so often lamented by mainstream white feminists and pop culture commentators alike.

And this is where my love of punk and a black feminists’ love of hip hop meet and shake hands.

What is it about punk music and rap music that makes them so hostile towards women? Is it the male bravado? Is it the blackness? Is it the anarchy?

No, decidedly and absolutely not.

Because the misogyny and homophobia we find in these genres is not what sets them apart from mainstream culture, it is the thing that ties them to it.

There are many things that define what rap and punk are: they both arose out of a sense of disaffection and alienation from the larger culture, at their core they are both about speaking truth to power and refusing to be defined or confined by a classist, racist society. The one thing about them that is not unique is the way in which they both often wind up reinforcing cultural hostilities against women, queers and other marginalized groups. The problem isn’t that they’ve stepped too far out of the dominant culture but that they have not stepped far enough.

So yes I love punk music and I like a lot of rap music, what I don’t love is the fact that so many of its creators have utterly failed to see how their regurgitation of objectifying, hateful and outright violent attitudes towards women is aligning them with the very system against which they so passionately speak out.

So before you throw the baby out with the bath water, remember that there is no corner of our culture that isn’t home to someone spewing hateful bullshit. And the best thing we can do is not to say “This corner sucks, I’m going back to the centre” but to stay put and point out just how naked that punk ass emperor is.
I love my punk, and no amount of hostility from the macho men involved will keep me from it.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Okay, I know I know, three posts inspired – at least in part – by Toshgate? There’s just so much to say though. I’m trying not to say exactly the same things everyone else has been saying so well, and I’m mostly trying to take a more personal approach so here you go, post number three citing Toshgate as inspiration.

I’ve spent the better part of the last week steeped in the muck of misogyny in the Twitterverse. While I haven’t been engaging nearly as much of some of my braver tweeps I have chosen to stick around and bear witness, showing support where I can.

And then today Shakesville posted this piece about Dan Savage’s track record of fat shaming and A Time to Laugh posted this piece about rape culture and slavery apologists in conservative evangelical circles.

And all of them bring me to the same point: These people who claim to be railing against the oppression of feminism/liberalism/political correctness want us to believe that they are speaking truth to power. Their rape jokes/fat shaming/slave apologia are a spark of light in the darkness, calling attention to uncomfortable truths. They portray themselves as being victimized or attacked by those who try to silence them with the muzzle of political correctness.

At first, the notion that they are pushing boundaries sounds kind of right. I mean their words are certainly shocking to hear. But scratch a little deeper, take even a nano-second to reflect on what purpose exactly those shocking words are serving and you can see that there is nothing revolutionary about what they are doing. Whether they are propagating the rape culture, promoting fat-phobia or denying the horrifying legacy of slavery their actions are simply a natural extension of the dominant discourse.

The only rule these people are breaking is the one that requires those with privilege to exercise and maintain that privilege by subtler, more insidious, more structural means.

Daniel Tosh, Dan Savage and Doug Wilson (triple D?) are not the black sheep of the family. Rather they are that loud drunken uncle that tells abrasive black jokes at the table while the rest of the family tut-tuts, only to go home and discuss why it’s a shame that that nice George Zimmerman is getting persecuted for defending himself. The Toshes and Wilson’s are extreme enough in their methods that the rest of us can just shake our heads, safe in the knowledge that “we’re not like that”. But make no mistake, if you have ever even suggested that a woman “should have known what to expect” or that “Black people should just get over it already” then you are just as much a part of the problem as the most offensive maker of rape jokes out there.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Wow, there’s a lot of shit pissing me off on the web this week. Never mind the natural disasters and the loss of a great Canadian political leader (we will carry on the fight Jack). I’ve got so many posts rattling around in my head that I feel stumped as to which one to write today. I guess I’ll go with what’s making my head explode at this very moment.

So, as you may or may not have noticed there has been a lot of discussion about race on the web lately. Or maybe that’s just in my twitter feed. In any case, between Mochamomma and The Good Men Project I’ve been spending a lot time reading (and a little time writing) about race.

My favourite one was the commenter who said that “blacks are jerks, that’s all.”

And you wonder why we’re still talking about race and racism.

And now I’d like to share a quote from the body of Damon’s most recent piece:

And, the reluctance to freely share, to have open and honest discussions about anything race-related, to "air our dirty laundry in public" is basically just us not wanting to provide any opportunity for “White America” to gather more evidence to support their latent belief that we’re just not supposed to be here.

This is why it’s so vital that white people call out racism when we see it.

~ ~ ~

Too often when we’re in public spaces the onus is put upon racialized* people to speak up when something, shall we say questionable, is said. I distinctly remember being in a classroom with only one black student when some discussion around race came up and all heads turned to her. I’ve since become familiar with this experience as the only out queer person in a room. Whenever something that could conceivably be perceived as homophobic was said all eyes would turn to me.

This, my friends, is bullshit.

Let me start with the most obvious thing. If you know enough to expect me to take issue then you know that perhaps something should be said. Instead of looking to the black kid or the queer kid or the kid in a wheelchair, why not just speak up your damn self?

Conversely, when someone who doesn’t fit the identity in question speaks up it creates confusion and often results in a different kind of resentment.

Let me share a friend’s story with you.

A good friend of mine was briefly enrolled at a local queer alternative school. He was glad to be free from the homophobia of his old school but frustrated with the other kinds of intolerance and ignorance he was hearing from his peers. When he called someone out on their racism/biphobia/sexism they would invariably say, “What do you care? You’re not black/bi/female.”

And therein lies the problem. What do I care? I care that people are daily living with systemic and interpersonal bias and outright hatred. I care that we live in a world that is inherently more dangerous for racialized people. I care that the voices of millions of people are silenced because they “just can’t get over it already”.

I don’t believe in a world where we only fight for causes that have obvious direct effects on our own lives. I don’t believe that there is anyone who isn’t adversely affected by the inequities in our system.

I do believe that a good life includes making choices based on who you want to be, not how you can benefit. I do believe that if we all open our eyes to the humanity of one another we will see how ludicrous it is to ask the question, “What do you care?”

Few people enjoy conflict. It’s scary to call someone out on their shit. Me, I hate it. People who know me may think I love it because I just keep on doing it. What they don’t know is that every time I do my hands start shaking and I have to fight to keep the tears at bay. I hate doing it and I hate the way it makes me feel but I do it. And speaking as someone who sees it from both sides let me tell you, it’s infinitely easier to speak up when you are not the target of the other persons vitriol.

It continually astounds me how patently unfair it is to expect the object of derision to be the one to speak up.

Let’s look at the risks involved.

As a white woman calling someone out on their racism the worst I’m likely to get (in most situations) is some foul language thrown my way. I’ll get called a slut, a bitch, a dyke – honest to God I once got called a squirrel (wtf?). As a woman if I call someone out on their misogyny I know that there is a real physical danger. I also know that my words will not be heard because I’m “just some whiny feminazi” and that any bystanders will be more likely to perceive me the same way.

Several years ago I was on a bus platform along with my mother and a diverse assortment of about fifty other people. Along came two white guys talking loudly about “those damn niggers”. I promptly shouted back, “Keep your racism to yourselves!” At which point they started calling me a whole range of sexist – and often nonsensical – epithets (see squirrel reference above). Later when I was telling someone about it they asked, “Why bother, it’s not like you’re going to change their minds.” And they were right, me calling them out in public is not going change their beliefs.

But that’s not the point.

While I may not be able to change their minds, if enough people actually call them out when they so publicly share those opinions, they may decide that they're better off keeping it to themselves. And this matters, because every time someone is allowed to pronounce these hateful attitudes unchecked they take over the public space and render it toxic and unsafe for the people against whom they are railing. Which brings me to my second point. I needed all of the bystanders and witnesses on that platform to hear the racism being squashed.

It is the responsibility of those who hold privilege, be it white, male, straight or cis to not be bystanders. When you don’t speak up you are complicit in creating that toxic environment.

It is a delicate balance. On one hand it is incumbent upon us to speak up, on the other hand we cannot, and should never try to, speak on behalf of someone else. To do so is paternalistic and condescending. We can, however speak in support of others.

When I speak about race and racism, I am not speaking on behalf of people of colour, I am speaking for my own values.

I am nobody’s saviour but my own, but I will stand by your side in the fight, because, to quote Emma Lazarus “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”

*After last week's post a good friend informed me that many people are now using the term "racialized" rather than "people of colour". This reflects the social context rather than focusing on the notion of colour. I will be trying to mostly use this term but may occasionally say POC for the flow of the writing.

A note regarding comments: Trolls and disrespectful comments will be deleted. I will not let my blog become a playground for bullies.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

This is going to be a long, and sometimes hard, one. I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts about race and racism lately, all of them great and all of them by women of colour. In particular I’ve been reading Mochamomma’s blog in which she’s discussed the unicorn cake debacle, and the “ask a black girl” phenomenon.

One of the things that has come up again and again is how rare it is for white women to blog about race and racism.

So...here I go.

Race and racism have been at the front of my mind for most of my life. As a white girl who grew up in rural Ontario the only people of colour I knew as a child were the Japanese boy in my class and the Trinidadian fruit pickers who worked on a nearby farm.

But, I also grew up with a Quaker hippie mom (of the social justice and political action variety rather than the pot smoking free love variety). I had a strong awareness of the existence of racial bigotry but had yet to witness it.

All of that changed when I was thirteen and spending my summers in St. Catharines with my best friend.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not I would tell the whole truth here. I realize that I am opening myself up to some serious judgment and anger. All I can say is, I was thirteen and I only had one friend so where she went, I went.

This is what you need to know about St. Catharines in the 80’s and 90’s: It was a breeding ground for neo-nazi skinheads. The teenagers were all neatly divided into their little boxes, especially the freaks. You had boneheads (distinct from the anti-racist skinheads), mods, hippies and punks. I was none of the above but I was definitely a freak. I also had no idea how to meet new people on my own. My best friend, however was a striking mod chick much admired by many . When she started dating a nazi punk I wound up spending a lot of time around him and his friends. I hated it but I didn’t know how to avoid it without alienating someone who meant so much to me (to her credit, the boyfriend in question gave up his Nazi ways in the time they were together).

For the most part I left the room any time they started talking their bullshit. Occasionally I took them to task only to be dazzled by the bizarre twists of “logic” they offered in defence of their views.

Eventually I was able to make other friends and stop spending time in the company of boneheads. But, honestly, I can’t say I regret that time because it taught me something about hate and hate groups that I don’t think I would have otherwise understood. Sometimes it’s good to spend some time behind enemy lines.

One thing I learned from that experience was that these people are people, they’re not monsters. Making them monsters makes it too easy to distance our selves and society from their beliefs and their actions. When we recognize that they are people we have to also examine how they came to be that way, because they sure as hell didn’t just spring from the head of Ernst Zundel like Athena from Zeus.

When I was sixteen I left home and moved to St. Catharines to finish high school. There were still plenty of boneheads but my new friends were very vocal anti-racists who had had the shit kicked out of them more than once by boneheads. I saw how ineffective it was to piss them off and I felt the fear of being chased by them. I even had them move in next door to me. After that my best friend (a different one by this time) who was Filipino refused to come to my apartment, and who can blame her? If that’s what they do to white people, what might the do to her? I had to call the cops one night because one them was pounding on my door screaming “Fucking faggot!!” at my friend who was visiting.

Most people’s experience of racism is not so dramatic. It’s the systemic racism of the criminal justice system or the unfair hiring practices of a workplace. It’s the subtle shifts in attitude when a person of colour walks into the room. It’s the throw away comments that people don’t think twice about. It’s the luxury of “not seeing race” because you can’t “see” your whiteness. It’s the wilful blindness of white people when they talk about how inspiring and heart-warming the latest edition of the white saviour trope was.

I still come to tears when I remember how volatile it was back then. How much a fabric of our daily lives it was that one of us could get beaten down at any time. I was there when my friend was attacked by five guys in steel toe boots and I was there to watch him get twisted into his own brand of hate, indiscriminately accusing people of being nazis, and even terrorizing their families.

I learned what unfettered hate looks like. And I understood that this was a natural consequence of the much subtler and more pernicious kind of racism that was a part of the very fabric of our culture. And aren’t those radical neo-nazis a perfect distraction from the much more insidious racism that affects people of colour on a daily basis?

You know what? I can identify a nazi skinhead in my sleep. I know how to tell a nazi punk from the rest of ‘em, no problem. You know what that means? It means I know where I fucking stand. It means that when I see those white laces and the iron cross on your jacket I know not to make eye contact and steer clear.

But when my coiffed middle class (white) boss at my minimum wage job starts talking about “chinamen” that’s a hole other bag of shit. That’s a blind side from someone in a position of authority and I am left speechless, because I need this job.

And when my university professor says “us” in reference to white people and “them” in reference to any people of colour – even when there are people of colour in the class – he is not only contributing to the othering of POC, he is effectively erasing those who are in the room.

One of my favourite profs in University was Andrew Winston whose research focuses on the role that social science and science have played in perpetuating racial stereotypes and racist policies (that’s a simplification but you get the gist). In intro psych we were assigned a book called “The Race Gallery” by Marek Kohn which outlined the history and the flawed science of race based research, particularly in the area of racial classification and intelligence. My take away from that book was that race is a social construct rather than a biological fact. However, and this is the important part, just because something is a social construct doesn’t mean it’s not real.

Race is real because it affects the identities and realities of everyone. Not just people of colour, everyone. Whiteness is not a blank slate, it is not the de facto absence of racial identity any more than maleness is the de facto absence of gender. The issue, for any thinking white person, is how do you inhabit and experience your whiteness? What does it mean to you to hold a racial identity that comes with so much privilege? What can you do to recognize your privilege and address it in a meaningful way? And if you answer that question with anything that sounds like, “Well I’m X so I’m oppressed too” you’re missing the point. Identity is a complicated and ever shifting thing. If you engage in the “more oppressed than thou” game everyone loses. The point is to think consciously and openly about what kind of privilege you benefit from and what that means.

Talking about race is hard, for everybody. But the difference is that white folk have the luxury, or shall we say privilege, of not thinking or talking about it. If you, as a white person, don’t notice that everyone in the room/film/book is white it’s not because you’re so progressive that you’re colour blind, it’s because you’re simply blind to the ways in which people of colour are simultaneously erased and problematically defined by those representations. If everyone in the room is white, why is that? How does that change the nature of the discussion? How does that affect the way people behave to one another? All too often an all or mostly white space is seen as a safe space to say ignorant or flat out hateful things.

So this is me, talking about race in the only way that I can, through the lens of my experience. I actually like talking about race and racism, just as I like talking about gender and sexism and homophobia and every other element of the kyriarchy (still getting used to that word). I most like talking about race with people of colour because talking about it with a bunch of white people is like talking in a vacuum and frankly, I’m more afraid of hearing some racist crap come out of another white persons mouth than I am of being called out by a black friend.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Sometimes when you bring together two already loaded words you wind up with something so much worse than the sum of its parts. Case in point: crazy bitch. People throw this around all the time and if you call them on it they react as though it’s just an adjective paired with a noun and damn it, why don’t you get a sense of humour you over-sensitive feminazi?!

So let me break it down for you. First let’s talk crazy. Before I go any further let’s be clear, using the word “crazy” is always loaded because there are real people suffering from mental illness who feel the brunt of the overuse of the word. In this context, however, it takes on special meaning. Women have been silenced, invalidated, and outright abused with accusations and diagnoses of insanity for the better part of the last few centuries. In the Victorian era women who expressed dissatisfaction with their repressive environment were diagnosed with hysteria. To this day male abusers claim “she’s crazy” when faced with allegations of assault. Women who openly express their sexual desire have been pathologized as nymphomaniacs with low self-esteem and women are still widely believed to be more unstable than men. Men can often be heard to utter the phrase, “bitches be crazy” and The Urban Dictionary has thirteen entries for “crazy bitch” (there are only two for “crazy asshole”) here are some highlights:

One of nearly 5 million images for "crazy bitch"

“a woman who gets mad at you when her man slaps your ass. She is also know to threaten to kick everyone’s ass but never does anything. If you see one please take a screwdriver to her forehead and let all the demons crawl out.
Run these woman are CRAZY BITCH and mad at all times !!!”

“A woman who after a break up slashes the tires on your car, burns your clothes, and tries to get you fired from your job then calls you the next day wanting to reconcile.
That crazy bitch keyed my car and then called me for a booty call!”

“A sexually crazy girl who loves to screw dirty, but will drive you mad otherwise through her bitchiness and insanity, you'll find many women fitting this description in hot night clubs.”

There are a few common threads here. First, she’s sex mad and second, she’s jealous and possessive.

So here we go again, women who like sex, who advocate for their interests and desires and are not ashamed of their bodies are crazy. Here’s a history lesson, in Victorian times young girls were at risk of having their clitoris removed or they’re labia sewn shut if they were caught masturbating.(1) A woman’s desires were pathological then and their pathological now.

And second, while I’m not denying that some women get jealous and do irrational things it is also true that women are far more likely to be victimized by controlling, possessive men, “Spousal violence makes up the single largest category of convictions involving violent offences in non-specialized adult courts in Canada over the five-year period 1997/98 to 2001/02. Over 90% of offenders were male.” (2) Clearly something else is going on here.

This notion of the “crazy bitch” as possessive and vengeful is that much more problematic in the way it is used to characterize black women. Images of black women in particular going “crazy” and breaking shit, slashing tires etc are common place in film and on TV and this stereotype is used to legitimize violence and threats of violence (see quote above which implores you to ” take a screwdriver to her forehead and let the demons out”).

Okay, moving on from the crazy…I’m not going to rehash age old arguments against the use of the word bitch. I am, however, going to say that when you pair crazy with bitch it becomes bigger, it invokes a particular gendered and sexualized image of a special kind of crazy. At best it is used to silence women, at worst it used to justify violence, both personal and systemic, against women. So when I get all ‘het up’ about someone being called a crazy bitch it is not because I am humourless, it is because it’s not fucking funny. Hate never is.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

I miss the show Roseanne. I miss that, for a little while, we were reminded that being poor and white did not mean you were an ignorant, racist shit. Poor white people are no more racist than the anyone else, they just haven’t been trained in the subtle art of talking out of both sides of their mouths. Here’s another difference, they don’t have the power to enact systemic racism. Bob from the parts plant may have some choice epithets, but Geoff at head office sets the corporate climate that prevents people of colour from advancing.

And lets talk about language for a minute. I’m not going to talk about how important our word choice is here, that’s been talked to death. And while I generally agree, I have seen too many privileged, educated women use their book learnin’ to silence women who are using the only words they’ve got. Rather than hearing what she is saying they are like heat seeking missiles waiting for her to ‘slip up’ with the wrong word choice. Perhaps we should give some credit where credit is due. Why not give some voice to the woman whose criticism of the kyriarchy comes from her gut, without the benefit of a degree in women’s studies.

I watched my friend who was working for shit wages in a garment factory get driven out of a feminist collective because they treated her like a moron. This while she deals with the reality of being paid half as much as the men at the factory up the road and gets forced to do overtime by her union rep.

So what does all of this mean? Poor white people are an easy target. Instead of engaging in some meaningful dialogue, and finding ways to include them in all levels of discourse, we dismiss them out of hand because they have bad grammar. How many times have you, or someone you know, dismissed an online comment because of a spelling or grammar mistake? I come from a family of grammar nuts but that? That is classism my friends. This is why the Tories and Republicans do so well when they talk about intellectual elitism.

So maybe before we go off assuming that being poor and white means you’re racist and ignorant we should recognize all the ways in which we exclude them from the conversation and the movement.